The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

When Burns was between six and seven, his father removed to the farm of Mount Oliphant, two miles from the Brig o' Doon. But the soil was poor, and the factor--afterwards pictured in "The Twa Dogs"--so harsh and unreasonable, that the tenant was glad to quit. In 1777 he removed about ten miles to the larger and better farm of Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. Here, after a short interval of prosperity, some trouble arose about the conditions of the lease. The dispute involved William Burnes in ruin, and he died broken-hearted in February, 1784.

Meanwhile, at the age of six, Robert, with his brother Gilbert, was learning to read, write, and sum under the direction of John Murdoch, an itinerant teacher, who has left an interesting description of his pupil.

"Gilbert always appeared to me to possess a more lively imagination," says Murdoch, "and to be more of the wit, than Robert. I attempted to teach them a little church-music. Here they were left far behind by all the rest of the school. Robert's ear, in particular, was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable. It was long before I could get them to distinguish one tune from another. Robert's countenance was generally grave and expressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful mind. Gilbert's face said, 'Mirth, with thee I mean to live;' and, certainly, if any person who knew the two boys had been asked which of them was the more likely to court the muses, he would never have guessed that Robert had a propensity of that kind."

When Murdoch left the district, the father himself continued to instruct the boys; but when Robert was about thirteen he and Gilbert were sent, "week about, during a summer quarter," to the parish school of Dalrymple. The good man could not pay two fees, or his two boys could not be spared at the same time from the farm!

"We lived very poorly," says the poet. "I was a dexterous ploughman for my age; and the next eldest to me was a brother [Gilbert], who could drive the plough very well, and help me to thrash the corn. A novel-writer might perhaps have viewed these scenes with some satisfaction, but so did not I." Burns's person, inured to daily toil, and continually exposed to every variety of weather, presented, before the usual time, every characteristic of robust and vigorous manhood. He says himself that he never feared a competitor in any species of rural exertion; and Gilbert, a man of uncommon bodily strength, adds that neither he, nor any labourer he ever saw at work, was equal to him, either in the cornfield or on the thrashing-floor.

Before his sixteenth year Burns had read a large amount of literature. But a collection of songs, he says significantly, "was my vade mecum. I pored over them, driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noticing the true, tender, or sublime from affectation or fustian." It was about this date that he "first committed the sin of rhyme." The subject was a "bewitching creature," a partner in the harvest field, and the song was that beginning "Once I loved a bonnie lass."

After this, though much occupied with labour and love, he found leisure occasionally to clothe the various moods of his mind in verse. It was as early as seventeen that he wrote the stanzas which open beautifully, "I dream'd I lay where flowers were springing," and also the ballad, "My father was a farmer upon the Carrick border," which, years afterwards, he used to con over with delight, because of the faithfulness with which it recalled to him the circumstances and feelings of his opening manhood. These are the only two of his very early productions in which there is nothing expressly about love. The rest were composed to celebrate the charms of those rustic beauties who followed each other in the domain of his fancy, or shared the capacious throne between them. The excursions of the rural lover form the theme of almost all the songs which Burns is known to have produced about this period; and such of these juvenile performances as have been preserved are beautiful. They show how powerfully his boyish fancy had been affected by the old rural minstrelsy of his own country, and how easily his native taste caught the secret of its charm.

In 1781, despairing of farming, he went to Irvine to learn flax-dressing with a relative. He was diligent at first, but misfortune soon overtook him. The shop where he was engaged caught fire, and he "was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence." Gilbert Burns dates a serious change in his character and conduct from this six months' residence in the seaport town. "He contracted," he says, "some acquaintance of a freer manner of thinking than he had been accustomed to, whose society prepared him for overleaping the bounds of rigid virtue which had hitherto restrained him."

He had certainly not come unscathed out of the society of those persons of "liberal opinions" with whom he consorted in Irvine; and he expressly attributes to their lessons the scrape into which he fell soon after "he put his hand to plough again." He was compelled, according to the then all but universal custom of rural parishes in Scotland, to do penance in church, before the congregation, in consequence of the birth of an illegitimate child. But not the amours, or the tavern, or drudging manual labour could keep him long from his true calling. "Rhyme," he says, "I had given up [on going to Irvine], but meeting with Fergusson's 'Scottish Poems,' I strung anew my wildly sounding lyre with emulating vigour." It was probably this accidental meeting with Fergusson that in a great measure finally determined the Scottish character of his poetry.